Save for a large city to the south along the shoreline and a highway running north and south, there wasn’t much to see. No suburban developments and few signs of life. The ground, from the shoreline to the tops of the foothills, was blanketed with rocks, tall-reaching cacti and scruffy desert plants. This had to be Mexico. Nowhere in America would such a large stretch of land abutting the ocean be free of people.
Before Camille touched down, she saw they were met by six mangy horses, one of which had a rider, a stout middle-aged Latino man with a thick mustache and a wavy shock of black hair. Two horses were strapped to a wagon laden with the wooden crates. The remaining horses were riderless and saddled.
She landed hard and grunted in pain when her knees hit gravel. The jumper attached to her toppled over her and shouted something in Spanish, then detached their harnesses and hauled her to her feet. Aaron stood nearby, a rifle pressed to his back. Despite it being February, the desert sun blazed against Camille’s fair skin. She licked her dry, cracked lips and tried unsuccessfully to swallow.
When someone shoved her toward him, her jelly legs lurched and she tripped over a rock. She would have fallen except Aaron reached out and caught her. With an expressionless face, he pulled her to his side and maintained a steadying hand on her elbow.
Mr. Mustache gestured to a chestnut-colored horse. With tentative steps, Camille approached it. She wiggled a foot into the stirrup and tried to hoist herself on, but her muscles refused to comply.
Aaron’s hands encircled her waist. “I’ve got you,” he whispered.
As he lifted, Camille hefted her leg over the saddle. Aaron swung behind her. It was the closest she’d been to a man in a long, long time. Check that—ever. She squirmed, desperate to put an inch or two between them.
“Easy there,” he muttered. To Camille’s mortification, he grabbed her hips and pulled her onto his groin. “Sorry.” His breath on her skin sent an involuntary shudder through her spine. “This saddle’s too small for the both of us.”
No kidding. “Just keep your hands to yourself.”
He responded with a quiet snort. “We’re going to die, Camille, and even if we weren’t, you’re not my type.”
“Believe me when I say that’s a relief.”
With Mr. Mustache holding the reins of Camille and Aaron’s horse, the caravan began a slow trot into the foothills, away from the city she’d seen in the distance.
As they rode in silence over an endless expanse of shrubs and sand, Camille caught a whiff of Aaron’s scent for the first time—clean, like freshly laundered cotton. Discreetly, she turned her face toward his neck and inhaled. No doubt about it, despite their ordeal, the man smelled like laundry straight out of the dryer. She squeezed her arms down, certain she didn’t smell as nice.
She’d learned the hard way that when men were as good-looking as Aaron, they were used to getting whatever they wanted. Aaron, in particular, oozed entitlement from his every pore. As though being born beautiful was anything more than lucky genes.
It irritated Camille to be the foil to his physical perfection. She neither looked nor smelled as good as he did. She felt awkward and unnatural on the horse while he was graceful and practiced. It was not an exaggeration to say he made being taken hostage look elegant and easy. No wonder she’d avoided him the past two years. His very existence felt toxic to her own.
When the trail turned steeply upward, Camille was forced to lean into his chest. He tensed in response. She turned to find him scowling.
“Don’t worry,” she growled, “it’s not a come-on. You’re not my type either.”
Not that it mattered in these last few minutes of his life, but no way would Aaron embarrass himself by sporting an erection while sharing a saddle with Camille Fisher. There would be no masking it since she was sitting on his lap, a position only slightly more comfortable than enduring the constant wiggling of her derriere.
Somehow, he had to figure out a way to stop his body’s reaction. First, he needed to quit smelling her hair, which was difficult because it was the most exquisite head of hair he’d ever seen, hanging in thick tresses down her back, inches from his nose. As the trail turned steep, Camille reclined into him and it took all his mental wrangling to not bury his face in it.
The second key to his success was not looking at or touching her long, perfectly toned legs to see if her skin was as soft as it looked. He remembered those legs from Jacob and Juliana’s wedding, how they looked holding up her red dress. What a waste, he’d thought at the time, to give such a body to a foul-tempered harpy.
The moment they crested a hill and a compound came into view, nestled in a narrow valley, Aaron began searching for a weakness in the layout he could exploit as an escape route. If there was one, though, he couldn’t find it. The towering cinder-block wall surrounding three squat, houselike buildings was topped with thick ropes of barbed wire. The iron-barred entrance gate on the east side, currently guarded by two men with rifles, was the only break in the wall.
The horses were led to the south of the compound, under a lean-to that served as a stable, where a pudgy man with wide-set eyes and a long, thin mouth like a frog took the reins. Aaron hadn’t seen a single car yet, which meant they would have to flee on horseback. With that in mind, he made damn sure he knew where the tack and saddles were stored before he and Camille were dragged from the horse and marched toward the entrance gate.
Barefoot, Camille stumbled along the inhospitable desert terrain. Aaron kept a firm hand on her elbow, steering her around the worst of the rocks and prickly cacti blanketing the ground, but her lack of footwear was one more strike against the probability of a successful escape, as if the odds weren’t impossible already.
By the time they reached the courtyard created by the buildings’ U-shaped layout, his hope for freedom had evaporated. The barbed wire-topped fence looked even more ominous up close and, with every step he took over the bullet-casing-littered ground, he counted another man and even more guns. They didn’t stand a chance of escaping this place with their lives.
They were prodded past an unmarked white delivery truck and a table loaded with what looked like satellite communication equipment and into the largest building that seemed to serve as the living quarters. Halfway down a dim hallway, they were muscled into a room that was empty save for the rusty metal chair Aaron was shoved into.
With a half dozen armed men surrounding him and a gun nudging Camille’s back, he didn’t put up a fight. Not even when a man with heavy acne scarring, holding a white rope, stepped forward to bind his hands behind the seatback and his legs to the legs of the chair. Within minutes, a second chair appeared and Camille was similarly bound.
Aaron met her gaze. The toughness he’d come to admire was still there, but shadowed by a hint of fear. As if maybe she’d done her own assessment of their odds and found them as bleak as he had.
From behind the cluster of men, a little girl with round, fearful eyes shuffled forward.
A tall, wiry man knelt next to her, whispering. She looked as though she was ready to run, but the man gripped her soiled red shirt tightly. She looked at Aaron and two tears rolled down her cheeks.
With a push from the man, she spoke in a mousy whisper in English. “We will send your picture to the American government.” After more prompting in Spanish, she continued. “Your government has one day to free the prisoners you took this week.” She paused and shook her head as more tears fell.
The man grabbed her frizzy black hair and shook her hard. “Habla ahora o no comerás esta noche.” Say it right now or you will not eat tonight.
For the first time in his life, Aaron wanted to hurt another human being. His nostrils flared as he struggled for self-control.
“Or … or …” the girl continued softly, “you will die.”
A